We all want to be Cavaliers

Roundhead Values, Cavalier Tastes: The Euroskeptic Tory, Daniel Hannan MEP, explains why he migrated from Cavalier to Cromwellian. Not a big leap considering the differences between Tories and Whigs are so small nowadays that they can safely be deferred to the other side of the grave.

Picking Sides, by Daniel Hannan, MEP

"The only thing I want to know about a man," said the Edwardian Liberal Isaac Foot, "is which side he would like his ancestors to have fought on at Marston Moor".

These days, it seems, we all want to be Cavaliers. So badly has the Good Old Cause fared that a new television drama will "raise eyebrows" by casting Kenneth Branagh as a sympathetic Cromwell.

I realise I'm going to alienate most of my natural constituency when I write this, but here goes. Thank Heaven Cromwell won.

Many contemporary Tories imagine, without giving the matter much thought, that they would have fought for the King. They are almost certainly wrong. The causes they hold dearest personal liberty, small government, parliamentary supremacy, patriotism, localism, Euro-scepticism would in fact have inclined them to Old Ironsides.

Much of the confusion arises, I think, from our tendency to look at history teleologically. Even now, more than a century after the debunking of the Macauley-Trevelyan interpretation of the period, we tend to believe that the British constitution developed by stages to its present condition, and this makes us think of the Parliament Men as progressives.

The description would have thrown them completely. In their own eyes, the Roundheads were conservatives, preserving traditional English liberties against the dangerous innovations of a foreign-influenced court. As Robert Ashton showed in his brilliant study The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution 1603-1649, the parliamentary cause was rooted in the defence of local freedoms, property rights and English particularism. Its advocates believed, with justice, that they were fighting to protect a way of life against the absolutism that was then spreading on the Continent.

It took me a while to see this. When I first studied the English Civil War, I was a paid-up Cavalier. My Lower VI history teacher, an inspirational man called Richard Wilkinson, was deeply Whiggish, both in his historiographical approach and in his political sympathies. Once, when telling us about Charles I's approaches to the Scots while imprisoned at Carisbrooke, he used the word "treacherous". I swelled up with the assured indignation that only a 16-year-old can manage: how, I asked, could he apply such a term to a monarch dealing with subjects in open revolt?

Twenty years later, I have come round to his point of view. Every generation fights a battle against the abuse of power. If the Roundheads were around today, they would see a Europhile elite busily selling its people's birthright. They would see the abuse of Executive power and the sidelining of Parliament (albeit in the form of quangoes rather than the Star Chamber). They would see the beliefs of the majority scorned and traduced by those in office. They would conclude that the country needed a dispersal and democratisation of power.

The Daily Telegraph is currently campaigning for precisely this. When the localist manifesto, Direct Democracy, was first published in this newspaper two years ago, its authors admitted their debt to the Civil War Parliamentarians. Their tract was subtitled "An Agenda for a new Model Party", and called for politicians to take a "Self-Denying Ordinance" to the exercise of state power. The localists described our weakened House of Commons as the "Barebones Parliament" and summarised their manifesto as "The Ten Propositions", echoing the 1641 document by which Parliament had demanded control over executive and judicial appointments.

Of course, if you believe that the experts should be allowed to run things without needing to worry about public opinion, if you think that the European Commission is staffed with wise and disinterested public servants, if you are happy for the country to be administered by quangoes and human rights judges, none of this will have much appeal for you. But if you have any spark of sympathy with the democratic cause, the chances are you would have lined up with Our Chief of Men.